Editorial

Spring is here, so we are naturally thinking about sex all the time. It was a busy winter with many personal calamities and meltdowns, and this only makes now a better time to think about sex. Big beautiful interspecies sex. Instrumentalized sex. Makeup sex and breakup sex. Overman sex and that business with the eunuch. Tender Marvin Gaye sex and also the weird stuff. Sex as the symbolic drainage area for desires that exceed and escape the society, but also as the visceral pelvic thrust behind those desires that glue the whole contraption together when it is actually hopelessly falling apart. Because we all know the fear of sex, and most of us have spent too much time close to a military or imperial or populist regime bent on regulating or functionalizing it. Keep it minimal, because this kind of intimacy mashes subject and object relations together in a way that makes governance confusing if not impossible.

In order to stabilize power, it is absolutely necessary to keep sex cordoned off and in its place because of how it switches and mutually erases notions of emancipation and enslavement, which is after all why sexual practices and codes can be such a terrifyingly direct line to how deeply emancipation and enslavement have been inscribed into the most minute practices of a person. Just on the level of muscle movements, you can detect an emancipated citizen lapsing into the most severe or infantile brutality, and the most repressed can freely express all the tenderness that is usually systematically foreclosed in every other part of the day or in every other part of the city. Sex is where classes switch roles just for kicks and gender can forget itself. In it, you can only be a conduit for codes of submission and domination that were written into your being at some point by history, ancestry, upbringing, star sign—and even though you can never change the fact that you will always be a macho entitled fuckhead or a generous submissive who stores all that hardship on a remote server, you can rewrite yourself through role play with another person.

Even if sex has been celebrated as a means for collectives to be formed by desire rather than by birthright, we know by now that it is too unstable to use as a base to construct any kind of lasting structure, and will rather always work as a force of entropy that exceeds attempts to capture and limit its flows within any stabilization mechanism. Sex now joins with a parliament of abstract and unruly forces that are integral to logics of class, capital, power, and property relations, but that also overflow their terms and compromise their command at every turn. It will always be the most visceral metaphor for what cannot be contained, just like the change of seasons. Which is why spring can only make us think about how there are things that you guess and things that you know, boys you can trust and girls that you don’t, about the little things you hide and the little things you show. Sometimes you think you're gonna get it but you don't, and that's just the way it goes.1

Spring is here, so we are naturally thinking about sex all the time. It was a busy winter with many personal calamities and meltdowns, and this only makes now a better time to think about sex. Big beautiful interspecies sex. Instrumentalized sex. Makeup sex and breakup sex. Overman sex and that business with the eunuch. Tender Marvin Gaye sex and also the weird stuff. Sex as the symbolic drainage area for desires that exceed and escape the society, but also as the visceral pelvic thrust...

1.
The historical socialist societies were usually severely criticized for their restrictions on sexual freedom. At the same time, the undergrounds of these same socialist societies were researched for manifestations of the sexuality that was supposedly suppressed because of ideological control. Researchers tried to discover the concealed practices of sexual liberation and subversive behavior, which would enable them to confirm that the expression of sexuality automatically subverts the...

The modern/contemporary subject tends to react to a “system” with a desire to change it, to undermine its order or escape its control. At the same time, the dominant system seems almost omnipotent, because the technology at its disposal is incommensurate with the forces and capabilities of an individual. Thus, the fight against the system appears lost from the beginning. That is why the modern subject is so often described as the subject of an impossible desire, or rather of a desire for the...

Tenderness, unburdened sentiments, and freedom are rarely found in the cinematographic spectrum of the 1950s. Arne Mattsson’s 1951 film One Summer of Happiness already assures us with its title that we are going to see something perishable. Just as the water of the lake where the two protagonists swim glitters only on the surface, and only when the sun is going down, the moments they share in this fluid and forgiving medium are already doomed. The film’s rather predictable boy-meets-girl...

In studies of repetition blindness, it is unclear whether the failure to recognize recurring items in a sequence owes primarily to an inability to notice similarities the second time something appears. Conflicting evidence indicates that it could just as easily involve an inability to remember the qualities something displayed the first time around. Psychologists are still split over this question. 1
A person must first be allowed to perambulate a structure, eyes gliding along its...

If you look closely, you can see the white lines on this fragment of wall.
And those who read Arabic can tell that these lines are actually letters and names. These are the names of men and women who have lived and worked in Lebanon as painters and sculptors over the past century. They are also the names that I have been receiving telepathically from artists in the future over the past nine years.
If, like me, you have experienced telepathic reception, then you know that you can...

Continued from “ Genres of Capitalism, Part I ”
The first part of these notes presented spiritualism, commercialism, and productivism as three ways of reading “capitalism,” which have formed, over time, into genres. This exercise proceeded from a slow-building impression that we don’t know precisely what we are talking about when we talk about “capitalism.” Or simply that the way we talk, read, and write about “capitalism” is not as helpful as it could be. Part I ended by noting that...

In response to Grant Kester’s “The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism,” 1 I have some concerns about the characterization of my work, but more importantly, it seems there is perhaps another “device” to be laid bare here, at the risk of being stale. As Anselm Frank writes in issue #8 of this journal, “critique, itself a modern practice, has entered into the often lamented crisis we currently face, foregrounding its complicities in upholding the power of the...

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